


start a collection of everything we're not

by Blake



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Empty Nest Syndrome, Enemies With Benefits, Flirting, Hate Sex, Internalized Homophobia, Ironfairy - Freeform, M/M, Modern AU, Neighbor tension, PWP, Rimming, Undernegotiated Kink, a touch of dub-con play but no actual dub-con, because they do not use words, but actually they're in love, letting your pets flirt for you, mid-life gay crisis, referenced impact play, rural new england, so much pretense, yankee candle au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:47:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27105955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: Thranduil’s horse is chewing up Dain’s lawn again.
Relationships: Dáin Ironfoot/Thranduil
Comments: 8
Kudos: 21





	start a collection of everything we're not

**Author's Note:**

> I spend so much time thinking about "split his pretty head open" and "faithless woodland sprite" and thranduil's stupid smile and about the romance between these two (who are dating and good for each other) and I try so hard to make them friends in my Tolkien Civilization VI mod but that game is homophobic so my attempts fail. So I'm writing fic about them instead.
> 
> Technically, this takes place in the universe of my yankee candle au, but I haven't posted anything from that yet, so this just stands alone, without a single candle reference! I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading!
> 
> [Moodboard (by my wife)](https://newleafover.tumblr.com/post/632429289024946176/start-a-collection-of-everything-were-not-by)

Thranduil’s horse is chewing up Dain’s lawn again. It’s pulling up grass by the roots and leaving giant hoofprints in the wet soil.

Dain sighs, blowing steam off the surface of his afternoon cup of coffee and watching it fog up the kitchen window. He should probably be annoyed about the horse. It’s sad, really, that his insufferable neighbor is only capable of flirting through such indirect means. There must be better ways of getting attention, ones that don’t involve decimating the lawn Dain pays good money to keep green, fertilized, mowed, and raked.

He dumps his coffee down the sink while texting with his other hand. _Acres and acres of pasture and your pretty little pony just spends all day trying to get to MY grass._ Then he heads upstairs for some mouthwash and cologne. He’ll head over to Thranduil’s in a bit, with his horse on a dog leash or something. That’ll be appropriately undignified.

But when he opens his front door to start the four-and-a-half-minute walk down his driveway and up his neighbor’s, he finds a sight. It’s Thranduil, hand raised as if to knock, looking preciously pink from the chill wind he clearly rushed against in his haste to get here. The faux-suede of his slippers is caked in mud. He must have taken the shortcut through the woods connecting their properties.

Thranduil straightens his back imperiously when Dain looks up at him. “Maybe if _my neighbor_ actually kept up the fence he promised to fix,” he says, refusing to acknowledge Dain by name, probably because he thinks it makes him seem aloof, “then my horse wouldn’t have the _option_ to escape and eat _my neighbor’s_ grass.”

Dain crosses his arms and slouches easily against his doorframe, because Thranduil being a bit of a giant isn’t nearly as threatening as he seems to hope it is. “Couldn’t send that in a text message, could you?” he asks with sarcastic curiosity, looking pointedly down at Thranduil’s muddy slippers again and smiling to himself.

“Well, I had to come get my horse, didn’t I?” Thranduil gestures behind him with a toss of his long, heavy hair. Dain gets lost in thinking about winding it twice around his fist and pulling. Then he remembers that he’s supposed to be playing along with all of Thranduil’s baffling pretense. He looks past Thranduil’s shoulder and out at his lawn, where the horse is now haltered and tied to a tree.

Dain supposes there will be a ring of bare dirt around the tree where once was grass by the time they’re done. It doesn’t seem too bad of a tradeoff. Especially when most of the joy of pretending to care about his lawn is riling up his neighbor about it. 

He sighs again and opens his door wider. Thranduil doesn’t move until Dain says, “Wipe your muddy hooves on the mat. I just had the floors cleaned.” Only once he says the magical, condescending, insulting words does Thranduil float through the doorway with a smile, ethereal and haughty, like he’s being so fucking evolved by not getting defensive about his manners or hygiene. He’s very much a turn-the-other-cheek kind of guy.

Fortunately for them both, Dain knows all too well that it’s only because of how desperately, pitifully, droolingly much he wants that other cheek slapped.

Dain bends down to unlace his own boots, letting Thranduil have an eyeful because he likes having an eyeful, as much as he won’t admit it. Sure enough, when Dain turns his head to check, suddenly Thranduil is attentively studying the framed family photographs littering the mantle. As if he had anything but contempt for the family in them.

Dain turns back to his boots and takes his time. He’s not particularly vain, but it’s been nice having an external motivation to start working out again, someone to come over at random intervals and sneak appreciative glances at him. He didn’t think he’d ever get his muscle mass back again after stepping back to take on more of a high-level management role in the construction company he once built with his own hands. He didn’t think he’d ever enjoy having eyes drag up and down his body again after his wife waited until he was bloated and middle-aged to leave him.

He wasn’t exactly counting on become a part of his neighbor’s midlife crisis, or his curiously late-onset gay crisis, or whatever this is. Dain doesn’t have the time to imagine what it’s like to be Thranduil. The idea of wasting energy in his late forties being insecure about his sexuality bores him to tears. The idea of routinely blaming conservatism on physical laborers without examining the toxic masculinity of his own social circles makes his eyes roll to the back of his head. The idea of being as rich as Thranduil is and having all the resources in the world at his disposal and hosting extravagant fundraisers for Green Party candidates and _still_ needing to set his horse loose instead of just asking every time he wants to suck dick—Well, that frustrates Dain to the point of wanting to break Thranduil down until he’s using words to beg for it.

He doesn’t always get Thranduil quite to that point—in fact, it’s a pretty delicate process, as he seems to have no problem waltzing away with a self-congratulatory laugh if he decides Dain is trying too obviously—but there’s plenty of fun to be had in the trying, obviously or not.

“Aren’t you going to offer me something to drink?” Thranduil asks, apparently worked up enough by Dain unlacing his boots to need a liquid excuse already.

Dain straightens up, reaching up to pull his bun tighter and enjoying how Thranduil’s gaze predictably falls to his biceps flexing against the sleeves of his flannel shirt. “Oh, sorry,” Dain says with a lot of fake apology in his voice, “I’m afraid I’m all out of white zinfandel.”

He likes the way Thranduil’s mouth twists when Dain deliberately misunderstands or mischaracterizes him. It’s as if Thranduil gets off on being too enigmatic to be accurately stereotyped. Or else he gets off on getting to inhabit trashy stereotypes for short periods of time. Dain doesn’t really care about any part of it but the smile. The smile usually ends up on his cock.

Thranduil likes gin, so Dain mixes some for them both. Then they stand around the empty fireplace drinking gin like two lonely old losers with empty nests and nothing better to do late on a golden Friday afternoon than fuck their most hated neighbors. That’s a sad thought. A sad thought for a sad cocktail. Dain abandons his drink on the mantle and reaches for Thranduil’s dyed, treated, and secretly graying blond hair instead. He winds it twice around his fist and pulls, like he’d been wanting to, like a boxer wrapping his hands for a match.

He pulls tighter and tighter. It takes a lot to get Thranduil to bare his throat.

Dain almost resents how beautiful it is when it happens. He lowers his mouth to mark up the skin stretched taut across his collar bone, since the ones from last time have already faded back to creamy white. He almost resents how good it tastes. His dick twitches in his pants. It’s probably pathetic that it’s the best thing he’s felt all day.

“You’ve been waiting all week to get your grubby hands on me, haven’t you?” Thranduil’s voice is strained from the arch in his throat. Dain’s cock aches to fill it.

Thankfully, this game isn’t about telling the truth. “Is that what you tell yourself? After you make yourself come thinking about my beard scraping up your pretty pink hole?”

One of the sexiest things about the man in Dain’s arms is that his knees don’t so much as wobble. If anything, his spine stiffens. The only hints of concession are the diamond flash of his eyes and the hot taste of the sneer on his thin lips when Dain bites down on them.

Once they’re in bed, Thranduil takes his sweet time licking and petting all across Dain’s body, nuzzling his face against the thick wall of his abs, moaning and gasping in surprise like he’s not in control of his actions. He likes feeling like he’s not the one controlling his actions. Dain pushes his head down, pries his teeth apart with a thumb, and finally gets that sweet, wet mouth around his cock.

Eventually he does get around to scraping his pretty pink hole raw with his beard, but by then, Dain’s dick is too hard for him to think of any clever comments about the way Thranduil’s hand is clutching his skull and trying to push his face closer and deeper. All he can think about is the hot, metallic tang of the flesh opening around his tongue until it’s empty and gaping, waiting to be filled, and then all he can think about is filling up that emptiness, and the taste of control as he shapes Thranduil around him, empty, full, empty, however Dain wants him in that instant.

Thranduil gets impatient, or feisty, or just mad with greed, perhaps. He tries to wrestle Dain onto his back, and then he tries again. He’s strong enough it’s a challenge for Dain to push him back down each time, but Dain enjoys a challenge. When Thranduil is flat on his back, looking up at Dain perched heavily on his thighs and panting, Dain rewards him with a hand stroking the cords of his inner thigh tendons, teasing, rubbing dark hairs this way and that. “What is it you want, sweetheart?” he asks, brushing his thumb slightly lower, where the skin is warm, soft, and wet with spit. It’s a leading question.

Precum leaks out across Thranduil’s pale stomach. “You know very well what I want,” Thranduil says, sounding a hell of a lot more composed than he looks.

“Do I, though?” Dain stretches his thumb to graze just the bottom curve of Thranduil’s ass where it meets his thigh. “As you’ve pointed out so many times before, I’m not the brightest, so.” He dives forward, then, exhaling the taste on his tongue out across Thranduil’s mouth and watching the hitch in his breath. “You’d better tell me, just to be clear.”

Thranduil pours a long groan into their kiss. When he breaks out of it for a second, the words pop out. “Fuck me.”

Dain kisses him, encouraging, but also greedy for the slick of it. Then he asks, “Say that again?”

“I want you to fuck me.” There are two strong hands on Dain’s thighs, pulling him forward. It’s actually hard to say no to them.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Dain murmurs before taking Thranduil’s cock in hand.

The expression on Thranduil’s face a minute later when he realizes that’s all he’s going to get is priceless. Dain moves his hand quick and rough, counting all the nuanced layers in that angled face of anger, frustration, betrayal, surrender, and the sheer gravity of hurtling unstoppably toward an edge. He wishes he could push a finger down to feel Thranduil’s body clenching hungrily around emptiness, but that would negate the emptiness and also surely put a smug smile on those swollen lips.

When Thranduil starts clenching his jaw and closing his eyes like he does when he’s close, Dain lines his own cock up with the one already in his hand and gets Thranduil to look down at where they touch, shiny and hard together. He gets to feel Thranduil’s cock pulsing against the whole length of him when he comes, and then he gets to make Thranduil feel the same thing when Dain follows shortly after.

Dain smiles up at the ceiling while Thranduil patters over to the bathroom to wipe his stomach clean and grumble loudly about the stench of Dain’s cologne. He doesn’t wait for Thranduil to finish dressing before he hops in the shower to rinse off and give Thranduil time to scurry quietly back to his house. They don’t do goodbyes. It’s not awkward. They just don’t really do them.

So Dain is a bit surprised when he comes downstairs in a fresh pair of sweatpants and finds Thranduil standing at his fireplace, sipping the drink Dain had left unfinished on the mantle.

It’s rare for Dain to feel unsure of what to say. He would like to know why his neighbor who hates him is still standing in his living room, drinking his gin, looking at his family photographs. He just doesn’t know what question to ask to get the answer.

Instead, he pours himself a new glass and joins Thranduil. Then they stand around the empty fireplace drinking gin like two lonely old losers with empty nests and nothing better to do late on a golden Friday afternoon than socialize with their most hated neighbors.

“I always get what I want,” Thranduil eventually says with a hint of that smug smile Dain shouldn’t find so attractive. “No matter how long it takes.”

Dain gets his meaning very well, but he thinks Thranduil might be underestimating how long it will take him to get it up again enough to fuck him like he asked. Especially if they keep drinking gin. They could be here all night.

“I’ve got a barn stall and some hay for your pony,” Dain says.

Thranduil doesn’t say anything, but it looks very much like he’s hiding a smile behind the tilt of his glass as he takes another drink.


End file.
